Rodrigo Hernández

Rodrigo Hernández studied visual arts in the la Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado, “La Esmeralda” in Mexico City and he completed his masters at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Karlsruhe, in Karlsruhe, Germany, in the class of artist Silvia Bächli. Hernández has developed a poetics in which elements from literature, art history and observation of the world converge in a new continuously evolving vocabulary, spoken from the surface of things. As if left alone to gaze at each other, figurative and abstract motifs unite and dialogue with each other, generating works that remind us of the unknown, yet present themselves to us with a warm familiarity. The result, poetic and somehow ironic, looks like the coming together of a universe intented to seek balance between physics and metaphysics, figuration and abstraction. It is no coincidence that consistent aspects of such a universe are explicitly inspired by the metaphysical paintings of Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. If he depicted mannequins and statues in his landscapes, Hernández usually presents a human silhouette in different stages of abstraction. This figure, however, is never what we understand as an “individual”; without ever exhibiting traits of singularity, it functions instead as a link between the artist, the work and the viewer and tell us, through the most generic nature of its traits, that it is through that which is most common that the individual becomes accessible. [...] In a way that is subtle and unostensive, without asking Hernández induces the viewer to follow the associative method that informs his practice. Looking at his work is like translating poetry: an act that is only possible if translators become poets themselves ...